INDIANAPOLIS — When Ja’Zeyha Drane went out with a girlfriend and her older sister to meet some other teens on the west side for a fight that began over text messages, she took along her little brother Da’Vonta White and his friend Isaiah Jackson for backup.
”Isaiah had a gun and none of us wanted to go there and not have anything and they did,” she said.
Luckily, said Ja’Zeyha, the other combatants never showed up.
“It wasn’t a well thought out mission,” she admitted.
Instead, the carload of teens returned home to the east side as Da’Vonta and Isaiah had arranged a meet at Dubarry Park with one of her brother’s younger friends.
”I guess they was supposed to be trading they gun with the other people because my brother didn’t have a gun,” said Ja’Zeyha. ”We park right there at the stop sign and Da’Vonta and Isaiah get out the car and they don’t head into the park, so they went behind some houses because the park is in a neighborhood.”
Da’Vonta was 14, Isaiah was 15 and the family thinks they were lured to the park through Instagram messages with a 13-year-old.
”My brother had actually been over to his house, they was friends, the account that he was texting,” said Ja’Zeyha.
The boys disappeared into the darkness and the girls stayed behind.
It was about 8:45 p.m. on April 7, 2022.
”We just chilled in the car and then we hear three gunshots,” remembered Ja’Zeyha. ”I’m telling the driver, ‘Okay, we gotta go back to the park. That’s my brother out there and I can’t leave without him. I gotta go look for him.’
”That’s when I looked and I seen Isaiah in the street and I’m still on the phone with my big brother and I screamed, ‘It’s a body! It’s a body!’”
Isaiah lay mortally wounded in the parking lot of the park.
It appears Da’Vonta made a run for it before he collapsed near a park building.
“I turned and look and I seen the body in the parking lot and I’m like, ‘What happened to my son? Somebody tell me what happened to my son?’” recalled Chiquanna White, who arrived on the scene minutes later. ”Supposed to have been one of Da’Vonta’s friends, I can’t remember the little boy’s name, but they was supposed to go meet him, but when they get to the park it wasn’t him. It was the other people.”
The 13-year-old caught a bullet, too, most likely friendly fire from the killer.
”We told them that was the shooter’s little brother,” said Chiquanna.
“How did you know that?" I asked her.
“You know how word gets around when stuff happens,” she answered.
Ja’Zeyah said it didn’t take long for Da’Vonta’s buddies to put 2 + 2 together.
”Like his friends knew who the boy was,” Ja’Zeyah told me. “They kind of gave us a better understanding of what was going on because they knew him.
”I started thinking that the younger person who was shot was maybe the person he was texting the whole time. Maybe he just had older people with him.”
“The boys that did it, they lived right there. They left behind a shoe,” said Chiquanna. ”The boy that was the actual shooter at the time he was 18, maybe 19.”
The suspects may lived near the vicinity of 8700 East 35th Street, but apparently their gun didn’t stay there.
”The gun that ends up in Kentucky is the gun the shooters used to kill them with,” said Chiquanna, who was told by police the firearm was traced back to an arrest in Hopkinsville.
An IMPD spokesman told FOX59 News, “Detectives believe they have identified people involved in the incident and the case was submitted for screening to the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office (MCPO). The case remains open, and anyone with information is asked to contact IMPD homicide detectives.”
”Its been two years,” said Ja’Zeyah. “How much evidence does it take?”
Chiquanna White didn’t know detectives had sent the case against her son’s alleged killer to the prosecutor until I told her.
”Its very frustrating. My sleep is still off. I don’t feel like my life will ever be the same. I’m a totally different person since this happened,” she said.
Chiquanna said she can’t bear to watch local TV news due to its coverage of teenage murders.
”Guns don’t solve everything. Put the guns down,” she said. “They taking our babies. And its every day.”
If you know anything about the murders of Da’Vonta White and Isaiah Jackson in Dubarry Park on a Monday night nearly two years ago, call Crime Stoppers at (317) 262-TIPS.
Your information could be worth a $1000 reward.
